Every new technology brings a rush to get in early. When mobile phones, apps, and digital wallets emerged, merchants raced to determine which platforms would shape the future of commerce, betting that an early commitment would give them a competitive edge.
While there have been winners and losers, no single platform has ultimately cornered the market in any of these areas. As a result, early adoption does not always provide the anticipated advantage. In many cases, merchants that committed early were instead forced to adjust their strategies downstream.
A similar scenario is now unfolding with agentic commerce, as merchants are being encouraged to commit to platforms with the promise of reaping first-mover rewards.
Merchants should be wary. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Adam Hiatt, EVP of Product Strategy at Spreedly, and Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed how the evolution of agentic commerce will likely follow a similarly fragmented path as other recent innovations.
This does not mean merchants should sit on the sidelines and wait to see how agentic commerce plays out. Instead, it underscores the importance of neutrality. Merchants should develop agent-agnostic infrastructure now so they can remain agile as the ecosystem evolves.
Mirroring the Orchestration Ethos
The fragmentation that has become prevalent across digital wallets and mobile ecosystems is already emerging in agentic commerce. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, for example, have all developed agentic checkout solutions that integrate with their popular chat interfaces.
Other firms have launched personal AI agent services, such as Muse or RockBot, designed to tak on consumers’ shopping tasks. The rapid splintering of this nascent market suggests that agentic commerce could follow a path similar to the early e-commerce payments environment.
“Merchants had more control over their stack, and they had more options,” Apgar said. “But what a lot of merchants didn’t realize was that debt flows out throughout the organization when it comes to managing multiple vendors in the finance area, in the ops area, in fulfillment, in the customer service chargebacks, returns, and all those things.”
“Every time you add another integration point in the dev shop, you create this waterfall of responsibility and expense throughout the organization,” he said. “This made the case for orchestration clear, to use an orchestrator to leverage one connection into multiple without the downstream responsibilities that flow through the organization.”
Although merchants have the capability to connect with the many protocols and standards emerging in the space, most will not want to maintain individual integrations with all of them.
This could lead some organizations to prioritize one protocol or format. But if the environment shifts and that early protocol does not become the standard that ultimately prevails, merchants could incur significant costs and operational disruption as they overhaul their infrastructure.
Adding to this complexity, the leading card networks have also developed standards governing how their payment rails will integrate with these protocols. Together, these developments have rapidly complicated what was already a highly sophisticated payments environment.
“We’re going to start seeing the need for technology, the criticality of technologies like processor-agnostic network card tokenization,” Hiatt said. “It is partly for its own sake, being able to process across any channel by any network partner channel and any PSP, assuming you’re going to be running multiple of those.”
“But it is also because the protocols that the card networks are creating around intent mandate tokenization for those agentic channels—basically the guardrails for the agents so they don’t run wild with a credit card—are being built on the same network tokenization rails,” he said. “That requires a bit of that neutrality; it requires a bit of that orchestration ethos.”
Developing This Year’s Strategy
As merchants strategize about the solutions they build this year, many may first consider building on-site chat interfaces and AI agents to enhance the customer experience. While these solutions may streamline aspects of e-commerce, they largely do not create new revenue channels.
In fact, many agentic commerce transactions are not net-new. They represent existing customers who are already shopping through a merchant’s e-commerce experience but have simply delegated those purchases to AI agents.
Given that much of agentic commerce will represent converted traffic, merchants should instead focus on developing AI-driven use cases that extend beyond the confines of their websites.
“New channels, new revenue, and new opportunities to reach customers are going to be top priority, so focusing there is the first thing I would attend to this year,” Hiatt said. “I would not get distracted by on-site agents. That may be cool and might work for your customers but are less likely to have the massive revenue shift outcome that we may expect to see from the new channels.”
Once those opportunities are identified, the next step is building the infrastructure needed to ensure the merchant can participate in the broader agentic ecosystem. Before a purchase can occur, a merchant’s products must be discoverable by AI agents, making catalog distribution a top priority.
Even when products are visible, shopping agents may not interpret product and service attributes in the same way human consumers do. Merchants will therefore likely need to revisit both the depth and detail of the information provided in their online catalogs.
For example, a consumer can visit a website and glean relevant product details from a few images and a short description. An AI agent, by contrast, may not be able to interpret images in the same way—or at all—and will likely process available information differently from a human shopper.
Providing sufficient detail is critical because AI agents will rapidly scan product information to determine whether an item meets the parameters they have been given.
While adding this level of detail may require some significant upfront work, the benefits can be substantial. This has already been evidenced in reports from major retailers such as Macy’s, which saw an increase in spending after adopting agentic-first search capabilities.
“The number one thing that AI and agentic brings to commerce is context, because people are having a chat with an AI agent at a deeper level than they are in a Google search bar,” Apgar said. “When the AI agent says, ‘Here’s something that might fit your needs,’ of course engagement is going to be higher because that is what prompted the chat in the first place.”
Finding a Source for Answers
While AI is expected to revolutionize the holiday shopping experience this year, full-blown agentic commerce is unlikely to take hold overnight. Many shoppers remain hesitant to fully delegate their purchasing decisions to AI agents. But if history is any indication, that reluctance could fade quickly.
“We started talking about e-commerce in the mid- to late-90s,” Apgar said. “It took the better part of 20 years for it to come up to where it is today, where it’s fully usable and it’s fully functional. Given the state of development, is agentic commerce going to take 20 years? Probably not. But it’s reasonable to say that that we’re probably five to seven years out from agentic operating as well as e-commerce does today.”
Given the pace of change, merchants must stay attuned to shifts in both technology and consumer behavior. The ecosystem is likely to evolve rapidly, making flexibility essential.
Ultimately, merchants need a strategy that keeps their brands visible within the agentic commerce ecosystem while allowing them to adapt their operations as that ecosystem develops.
For most merchants, the complexity of managing payments in this environment will also increase the importance of their payment partners, which will likely play a greater role in helping merchants navigate the agentic commerce arena.
“This is their expertise and where they spend their days, so the reality is that you should expect your vendors to be on top of those evolutions and providing you the answers,” Hiatt said. “Ideally, this comes through the lens of using orchestrators or PSPs who are forward-thinking and know what they’re doing. They’re providing not just insight, but also eventually the technical solutions to bridge those gaps and to be that single source of an answer.”
“Thankfully, we are in a much more mature environment than we were 10 to 15 years ago, after seeing some of these earlier technical iterations come through,” he said. “Lean on your vendor partners and form an opinion on those channels where your customers will be. Ultimately that’s going to help you decide where you’re making those bets.”
